
TYNDALL’'S EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE 221 
failure, owing to some accidental contamination 
having occurred after the nourishing fluid had been 
heated.? 
In order to show that the view I have taken as 
to the unsatisfactory methods and conflicting results 
obtained by Professor Tyndall is not due to personal 
bias on my part, I think it well to quote here what 
was said on the subject by a writer in The 
Contemporary Review for April 1877, under the 
signature of “Inquirer.” And in regard to the 
competence of the author I am now at liberty to 
say that the writer was the late G. W. Hemming, a 
former Senior Wrangler, an eminent K.C., and later, 
for some years, one of the Judicial Referees of the 
High Court. He was a man of great intellectual 
power and sagacity, who knew all details of the 
controversy which had been taking place during the 
previous six or seven years, almost, if not quite, as 
well as I did; and this is what he had to say con- 
cerning Professor Tyndall’s experiments :— 
“The only other experiments to which we need 
refer, on the point now under consideration, are the 
very elaborate series conducted by Professor Tyndall 
since the Bastian-Sanderson report. These, like 
Pasteur’s, have not been precisely repeated, but 
1 Professor Tyndall made so many erroneous statements in an article 
generally condemnatory of my views which appeared in Zhe Nine- 
teenth Century for January 1878, that I was obliged to reply in the 
February number of the same review. After that, and previous to the 
present work, I have published nothing on the subject of Archebiosis 
save one chapter in my book, “The Nature and Origin of Living 
Matter,” 1905. 
